DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

A Web, Not a Tree

Science in the Looking Glass: What Do Scientists Really Know?
By E. Brian Davies. Oxford University Press, 2003. 295 pp. Cloth, $34.50.

On page 116 of Science in the Looking Glass, Davies says the following: "One should imagine mathematics not as a tree in which everything is fed by the roots of logic and set theory, but rather as a web in which every part strengthens every other part." This is similar to the message we heard from Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he pointed out that advancement in science is not a linear boxcar-like accumulation of facts. Kuhn and Davies remind us that both science and mathematics change and grow in a rather untidy process. The evolution of science and mathematics, it seems, is much like the evolution of many other social structures.